Oh boy! Things are happening! I am at Motolab right now working on the Minsk. I'll start uploading photos to my Picasa as we go along, so if you are a real fiend for fresh Minsk content you can see the photos there before I post. Live Minsk pictures!

I have a long illustrious history of doing stupid things. As a child, it started with things like jumping off of the roof holding an umbrella to see if it would slow me down (it didn't), and jumping my mountain bike into immovable objects. I was more concerned with the jump itself than what was directly in the landing path. Once it was an apple tree, another time a closed garage door.

Later, while living on Nantucket, the harbor froze, so I did what any wicked smaht brain-box kid would do: walk on it, with no adult supervision. Fell through. Cold, etc.

I've fallen off of my house, towed more than one 5000lb vehicle with a 4 cylinder S10, been bitten by a rattle snake, driven a decrepit '84 Mitsubishi Starion LE Turbo to L.A. and back in one day, and last but not least, imported 3 Minsks into the U.S.

I bring these things up because I think I have just raised the bar.

A few days ago a friendly gentleman said I should try soda blasting my parts rather than using a wire wheel. It seemed like a reasonable idea to me, so I borrowed a blaster from my friend Deniz, went to Costco and bought 27lbs of baking soda, and went to work.

I started the project outside, but after less than a minute of blasting I noticed the immense white cloud of dust going into my house, out into my driveway, and worse, over into my neighbors house. Being the polite gentleman that I am, I decided I should find an alternative to coating the entire neighborhood with a fine white powder.

I remembered painting my old car trailer in my garage some time ago, and that worked fine. I stripped it all down to bare metal, resprayed it, and then when I was all done I just blew all the dust out with compressed air. No problem...

Having put a good 9 seconds of thought into this decision, I dragged my air line back inside and went to work. Dust mask, safety glasses, hearing protection, compressor thumping away trying to keep up. Soda blasting is awesome. It strips off paint, rust, and that strange shmegma made up of 2-stroke oil and fossilized dust without hurting the aluminum, or even the seals.

This concludes the cheery bit of my soda blasting odyssey.

I was having so much fun soda blasting that I didn't really pay attention to what was happening to my garage until I ran out of baking soda. When I had a look around I realized that this was nothing like when I repainted my car trailer. Stripping the whole trailer probably created 60oz of dust, whereas I had just distributed 27 pounds of baking soda evenly across everything in my garage. Oh boy...

Then when I went outside I realized that I had a pretty serious nose bleed; apparently a fair amount of baking soda was getting through my flimsy paper dust mask.

After taking a good look around I decided that my garage was such a wreck that I might as well just go buy more baking soda (and a real respirator) and finish the project, it wouldn't get any harder to clean up.

So the next day I finished the engine, then lightly blasted everything else. I used 40lbs of baking soda, on top of the 27lbs from the previous day.

NOW the garage was ruined. It was more than an inch thick in places. Even though I had closed all the drawers in my tool boxes and closed the doors of the chemical cabinet, they were both full. It occurred to me that it would probably be easier to just move to a new house and forget this ever happened.

Two years later I finally stumble across this thread - quite possibly the funniest single post I've ever seen on the InterWebz - thanks - I started giggling so hard I started coughing!

For probably the 107th time in my life, I just discovered that no matter how much you yell, curse, or threaten, you simply cannot sand paint before it dries. Frick. Screw this project, I'm going to Motolab to play Minsk.

I just stumbled on to this, and you have made my morning. that thing is begging for wheels. Speaking of which, you going to end up using the original rims with the soviet tire size, or re-lacing the hubs to a newer more common size?

I just stumbled on to this, and you have made my morning. that thing is begging for wheels. Speaking of which, you going to end up using the original rims with the soviet tire size, or re-lacing the hubs to a newer more common size?

It is actually using a readily available tire size, 3.00-18. Funny you should ask, after we finished working last night (well, this morning technically) Derek and I picked out some new tires, and they are on their way.

I'm feeling good about the Minsk right now. After last night's Heat & Smash, Derek measured the head tube, and he says we are very close. What a relief. I feel like we made actual progress last night, like we may have progressed a few yards towards the light at the end of this long, long, crumbling, stinky Soviet tunnel. Can't wait to do the next step!

It is actually using a readily available tire size, 3.00-18. Funny you should ask, after we finished working last night (well, this morning technically) Derek and I picked out some new tires, and they are on their way.

I'm feeling good about the Minsk right now. After last night's Heat & Smash, Derek measured the head tube, and he says we are very close. What a relief. I feel like we made actual progress last night, like we may have progressed a few yards towards the light at the end of this long, long, crumbling, stinky Soviet tunnel. Can't wait to do the next step!

read the whole thread tonight, and i must say... you are a brave (or idiotic) man! working on old bikes is fun because no matter how much you weld them, smash them and jerry rig things, they work somehow.. btw.. i laughed for atleast 5min on the whole soda blasting part.... rediculous
worked on a 73 suzuki 125 for about 2 years, and i know how it feels to put money into somthing that seems hopeless